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Taking Back the Streets

NEW YORK’S streets are as gritty as the city’s reputation, traffic-clogged canyons of concrete where New Yorkers, on foot and in vehicles, jostle and growl, exulting all the while. Stared down a Hummer lately? Yet there is a growing desire to tame New York’s 5,800 miles of streets, sidewalks and highways, which constitute the city’s principal social space.

The most highly publicized effort is Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing proposal, which was approved by the City Council on Monday and as of Friday evening was awaiting a vote by the State Legislature. But ideas for calming New York’s historically hectic streets go far beyond congestion pricing. Those ideas, moreover, seem to signal a shift in the basic thinking of what streets are for.

“For decades, the Department of Transportation’s job has been to move vehicles as quickly as possible,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the agency’s commissioner. “We’re taking a look at it a little bit differently now. There is a tremendous hunger for what we can do to make it easier for people to get around, to improve the quality of our streets and plazas, to make it easier for people to linger.”

These street reformers — planners, architects and urban officials from around the globe — are questioning the conventional street-curb-sidewalk motif, challenging the dominance of cars, and devising ways to use street furniture, plants and even radical new vehicles to transform the experience of the street.

While they do not necessarily agree on the particulars, the advocates often share an excitement, a feeling of being present at the creation.

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Credit
Daniel Pelavin

“Let’s go to the next level,” said Ethan Kent, vice president of the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit group based in Manhattan, “to create great streets that really draw out the life of the communities they’re meant to serve.”

Here are 10 ideas, some modest and some ambitious, some already in place and others just a gleam in the eye, that the new crop of urban dreamers are proposing.

The Woonerf

“Twenty or thirty years ago we had two different types of streets to choose from,” said Jan Gehl, an urban planner from Copenhagen who is advising the Transportation Department on ways to revamp New York’s public spaces. “One was the traffic street and the other was the pedestrian mall. Now we have about eight streets to choose from.”

One such street is the woonerf. Pioneered in the Netherlands — the word roughly translates as “living street” — the woonerf erases the boundary between sidewalk and street to give pedestrians the same clout as cars. Elements like traffic lights, stop signs, lane markings and crossing signals are removed, while the level of the street is raised to the same height as the sidewalk.

A woonerf, which is surfaced with paving blocks to signal a pedestrian-priority zone, is, in effect, an outdoor living room, with furniture to encourage the social use of the street. Surprisingly, it results in drastically slower traffic, since the woonerf is a people-first zone and cars enter it more warily. “The idea is that people shall look each other in the eye and maneuver in respect of each other,” Mr. Gehl said.

Play Streets

The idea of blocking off streets so children can play rousing games of skelly and the like dates to at least 1916, when worried city officials called for shutting 100 streets in congested areas during certain times of day. “It is only natural that children should want to play,” a sympathetic police officer told The New York Times that year, “and if the city refuses to provide playgrounds for them, they are going to play in the streets.”

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Play StreetsCredit
Nigel Holmes

Nowadays, the Police Athletic League operates scores of these play streets during the summer. But some planners suggest making them permanent.

Year-round play zones could extend the sidewalk as a landscaped area, or as a playground. Traffic may be allowed, but greatly slowed by the addition of “pinch points” at intersections. Sidewalk “bumps” could be installed to force cars through a serpentine route and slow them to 10 miles an hour — slow enough to stop for a wayward youngster.

Bicycle Boulevards

Fewer than 1 percent of New Yorkers bike to work, compared with one-third of the residents of, say, Copenhagen.

To promote more cycling in New York, Mr. Bloomberg is calling for 504 miles of separated bike paths and 1,296 miles of striped bicycle lanes citywide by 2030. The separated paths use different kinds of barriers. The path that already exists in Manhattan on Ninth Avenue from 16th to 23rd Street is cushioned from traffic by a row of parked cars. And in the proposed design for the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, a 14-mile route that would stretch from Greenpoint to Bay Ridge, rows of trees might serve as the divider.

Taking the concept a step further, Portland, Ore., has turned whole streets into “bicycle boulevards,” diverting motorists at key points but allowing bicycles and pedestrians to continue on. A not-so-fringe benefit of these boulevards is higher property values on kid-friendly, traffic-calmed community streets.

Pavement Hierarchy

Manhattan’s street grid beautifully accommodates urban chaos within its rigid frame of right angles. But the layout may also mean too many streets designed primarily for cars.

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Bicycle BoulevardsCredit
Nigel Holmes

“One thing which characterizes New York is all streets are generally the same concept,” said Mr. Gehl, the Danish planner. “Too many cars in the middle, and too little space for pedestrians at the edge.”

Under a more varied approach, some streets could be retained as traffic ways, while others could be transformed into plazas or vest-pocket parks. Such a mix would dovetail nicely with Mr. Bloomberg’s long-term goal of turning excess road space into a pedestrian plaza in every neighborhood.

“It’s like the alchemy of transportation,” Commissioner Sadik-Khan said, citing the new Pearl Street Plaza in Dumbo, Brooklyn, as one of the first steps in the mayor’s plaza plan. “You’re transforming asphalt into green space.”

Green Grid

In 1962, Copenhagen did the unthinkable. It closed its traditional main street, the Stroget, to cars. That street is now the center of a network of pedestrian-only streets that is the cynosure of transit dreamers around the world.

One of those dreamers is George Haikalis, a transportation planner, who proposes turning a chunk of Manhattan into a “green grid.” The grid, a 30-mile, continuous network of pedestrian-heavy roads like Broadway and 42nd Street, would be car-free and would be lined with seating, trees, cafes and vendors.

These streets might even have a light-rail line, as they do in a proposal that Mr. Haikalis has long championed to make 42nd Street a landscaped pedestrian space. Even the track beds for the train could be planted with turf.

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Lanescapes Credit
Nigel Holmes

“We’re going to spend a pile of money widening the sidewalks a little bit and narrowing the streets a little bit,” Mr. Haikalis said of city plans to ease pedlock — pedestrian congestion — in Times Square. “Why not close 42nd Street and create some public space that pedestrians could really enjoy?”

Mental Speed Bumps

Slower traffic can make for a friendlier city. But slowing traffic can be done in harsh ways: Speed bumps, traffic circles and the intentional bottlenecks known as chokers are auto-hostile tactics that do little for pedestrians. Gentler measures include tweaking the timing of traffic signals, or using what David Engwicht, an Australian traffic expert, calls “mental speed bumps”— street-side social activities that slow drivers without their knowing the foot is on the brake.

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A community project called Ninth Avenue Renaissance, for example, proposes the use of on-street parking spaces on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan for barbecues and the like, adding a dose of intrigue to the street scene that will lead motorists to become curious, and slow down. “New York has these sorts of mental speed bumps,” said Mr. Kent, of the Project for Public Spaces, “but we’ve slowly degraded them by designing a more and more frictionless city for fast walkers and fast drivers.” But street-level friction, he said, is actually good.

Swaled Streets

In Seattle, greening the street with landscaped areas called swales has cut the total volume of storm water runoff from the street by 99 percent. Swaled streets also cost 20 percent less to build than conventional roads. But swaled streets also have aesthetic benefits.

“Birds are going to love this place,” said Michael Singer, an artist who is part of a team helping the city to reinvent Queens Plaza, in Long Island City. The plan, for which construction will begin this fall, will replace soul-sapping asphalt with bird-friendly turf, put layers of plants around the skeletal infrastructure of the elevated subway lines, and tie those planted areas into landscaped areas with cisterns to collect storm water.

To gauge the effect of the plan, Mr. Singer said, imagine avenues lined with blocklong patches of rustling leaves and singing birds. “All of that pulls attention away from things you want to put out of sight and out of mind when you’re in a dense urban area,” he said.

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Gentle Congestion Credit
Nigel Holmes

Lanescapes

Converting parts of city streets to pedestrian lanes is fine, but champions of “lanescapes” go further and dress up those spaces in various imaginative ways. At Columbus Circle, for example, two lanes of Broadway could be devoted to Jazz at Lincoln Center, with bebop bands spilling into the street. At Times Square, portions of the streets could accommodate legions of out-of-work actors reliving the movie “Fame.”

These examples hint at one of the chief strengths of the idea.

“All these places have identities you could bring to the street,” said Michael Fishman, a planning consultant based in New York. In Hunts Point in the Bronx, for example, where storm-water runoff pollutes the Bronx River, the lanes could be wetlands. On Park Avenue? Thumbnail biographies of robber barons embedded in the asphalt.

Gentle Congestion

Instead of designing cities for cars, why not design cars for a kinder city?

That’s what researchers at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have cooked up: smarter, gentler modes of urban transportation.

“If you think of your average car, it doesn’t have the same smarts as a horse,” said Mitchell Joachim, a former Media Lab researcher. A horse, he points out, is unlikely to run off the road, naturally avoids head-on collisions, and at least comes when you whistle.

With the horse in mind, Dr. Joachim, now executive director of a New York design collaborative called Terreform, has helped conceive of a lightweight electric car that would sense the presence of other vehicles and slow down in potentially dangerous areas.

On-board navigation systems would drive people where they wanted to go. Parking meters, linked to each other and to the vehicles, could signal an open space. These smart cars would even sense that pothole you just ran over, and report it to maintenance crews.

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Urban Acupuncture Credit
Nigel Holmes

Because the vehicles could be made of soy-based plastic shells that could bump into each other without damage, they could move in flocks. Designers call it “gentle congestion.” Quick braking systems protect pedestrians, so there is no need for sidewalks, lanes or signals.

More than 10 years ago, Michael Sorkin, who is the director of the graduate urban design program at City College, proposed a plan to channel growth and to encourage a lively social scene in East New York, Brooklyn, a community with large tracts of vacant land.

First, plant a bodacious tree in the middle of an intersection, Mr. Sorkin said. Landscape the rest into a green berm, radiating coolness and quiet. “Immediately it calms the traffic in its lee,” said Mr. Sorkin, who calls his as-yet-untested idea urban acupuncture.

This greened intersection would be linked with vacant lots and pedestrian paths, creating green zones that force development toward the center and encourage pedestrians into those unscripted seductions for which the city is renowned.

“Cities are generators of accidents,” Mr. Sorkin said. “And to the degree that they are happy accidents, that’s the indicator of a good city.

“It is absolutely critical that the people on foot are at the top of the hierarchy,” Mr. Sorkin continued. “The alpha mode is the shoe.”

Jeff Byles, an editor at The Architect’s Newspaper, is the author of “Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition.”